In the conventional telephone answering service, when a sending terminal makes a call through a communication network and a receiving terminal cannot answer it, the sender leaves a message, if necessary, following message acceptance guidance. After that, when the receiving terminal becomes available to answer a call, the receiver interrogates an exchange if any message has been left for him/her and receives the message.
Generally, the sender vocally inputs the message to the receiver through the mouthpiece of the sending terminal to register it with the exchange.
Besides, there have been proposed techniques for automatically distributing voice data. For example, Japanese Patent Application laid open No. 2001-119486 discloses a voice distribution service providing method. According to the method, a registrant of a voice distribution service stores a voice information file in a voice distributor through a terminal connected to a public network. A subscriber to the voice distribution service inputs in a user terminal such information as the code of voice data, the telephone number of a terminal where the voice data is to be delivered and the date of distribution to transmit the information to the voice distributor. Thereby, the voice distributor automatically distributes the designated voice data to the terminal with the designated telephone number at the designated date.
In the conventional telephone answering service, however, a message can be registered only through the mouthpiece of a sending terminal. Therefore, if a message is registered together with music as BGM, the sound of the music deteriorates to be unclear while the message is registered with the exchange through the mouthpiece of the terminal. Thus, there is a limitation on the freedom of message creation.